Programming Rust, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Operator Overloading

In the Mandelbrot set plotter we showed in Chapter 2, we used the num crate’s Complex type to represent a number on the complex plane:

#[derive(Clone, Copy, Debug)]
struct Complex<T> {
    /// Real portion of the complex number
    re: T,

    /// Imaginary portion of the complex number
    im: T,
}

We were able to add and multiply Complex numbers just like any built-in numeric type, using Rust’s + and * operators:

z = z * z + c;

You can make your own types support arithmetic and other operators, too, just by implementing a few built-in traits. This is called operator overloading, and the effect is much like operator overloading in C++, C#, Python, and Ruby.

The traits for operator overloading fall into a few categories depending on what part of the language they support, as shown in Table 12-1. In this chapter, we’ll cover each category. Our goal is not just to help you integrate your own types nicely into the language, but also to give you a better sense of how to write generic functions like the dot product function described in “Reverse-Engineering Bounds” that operate on types most naturally used via these operators. The chapter should also give some insight into how some features of the language itself are implemented.

Table 12-1. Summary of traits for operator overloading

Category	Trait	Operator
Unary operators	std::ops::Neg	-x
	std::ops::Not	!x
Arithmetic operators	std::ops::Add	x + y
	std::ops::Sub	x - y
	std::ops::Mul	x * ...